While searching through old images on my laptop I came across this one, from Mount Evans in Colorado. Taken by the infamous Murilee Martin, it's me in a McLaren 650S some two miles above sea level. When I saw this wall of ice on our uneasy trip up the mountain, I had to stop and get the shot. Poor Murilee was in shirt sleeves despite the sub-freezing weather up there, literally standing at the edge of a thousand-foot cliff with his heels in the air and trying to frame the photo just right while I yelled at him to "GET THE WHOLE WALL OF ICE, OKAY?"
Driving up the ice-slick paved road to the summit, the McLaren's wide summer tires skittering and sliding to the shoulder, knowing that a major wag of the tail would probably result in leaving the mountain at the speed of freefall in someone else's $350,000 automobile, I should have been focusing entirely at the task at hand. My passenger certainly would have appreciated me doing so. But for some reason I was thinking of an old Steve Earle song.
I'll repeat the lyrics here:
The eagle looked down on the river below And he wrapped his wings round him and he fell like a stone And the big salmon fought but the talons held true Shuddered as the world turned from silver to blue
I stood there in awe though I'd seen it before I was born in these mountains and I'll die here for sure I've traveled around I've seen city lights But nothin' that shined like the big sky at night
Some mornings will find me up above the timberline Lonesome don't seem like much once you're this high When it's all said and done I usually find Me and the eagle are of the same mind
Now when I was young I took me a wife But she never took to the high country life So now I'm alone I don't really mind But her name echoes down from the canyon sometimes
Some mornings will find me up above the timberline Lonesome don't seem like much once you're this high When it's all said and done I usually find Me and the eagle are of the same mind
In my dreams there's a horse, he stands eighteen hands high He's as white as the snow and there's fire in his eyes And he'll bear only me though others have tried And together we'll travel up across the divide
Some mornings will find me up above the timberline Lonesome don't seem like much once you're this high When it's all said and done I usually find Me and the eagle are of the same mind
Me and the eagle are of the same mind
So as I drove up that hill, using just my fingertips to steer the car the same way Michael Schumacher did the Ferraris of the V10 era, I thought about some of the people I'd loved and said goodbye to, and the people whom I loved and to whom I'd be saying goodbye in the future. I thought about balancing my affection for others with my desire to accomplish something, anything at all, before running out of time on this planet.
Lonesome don't seem like much once you're this high
And though I had a friend with me, and though I was quite comfortably ensconced within a carbon-fiber supercar, I felt a sort of kinship with the narrator of Steve Earle's song. You're never as productive, as effective, as brilliant as you are when you're alone. But not all of us can rely on a mountain to do our dirty work. Sometimes, in order to free people to be their best selves, and to be your own best self, you have to bring the mountain to yourself. When it's all said and done, that is what you'll usually find.